Thurston's Snell grateful for health-restoring donation

Longtime friends and fellow Redford Thurston football coaches Pete Kotsogiannis (left) and Bob Snell are doing well a few days after Kotsogiannis donated a kidney and Snell received one.(Photo: SUBMITTED)

At some point during the aftermath of his heroic kidney-donation surgery on June 20, Redford Thurston assistant football coach Pete Kotsogiannis requested a modest and lighthearted favor from the potential life-saving (and certainly life-enhancing) procedure’s benefactor — Redford Thurston head football coach (and Kotsogiannis’s brother-in-law) Bob Snell.

“Since I’ve only been a coordinator on the defensive side of the ball, I told Bob that all I wanted in return was to call the first offensive play for Thurston this season,” Kotsogiannis revealed, smiling. “We work on all these trick plays, but never use them. If he lets me call the play, we’re running a fancy one.”

The fact that Kotsogiannis and Snell were able to joke about the amazing and delicate four-person, paired donor kidney transplants that also involved two participants from California — a pair of acquaintances, like Snell and Kotsogiannis, one of whom was the recipient of Kotsogiannis’s kidney, the other a donor for Snell — was a reflection of the procedure’s early-stage success.

On June 21, the day the anonymous donor’s kidney was surgically implanted into Snell’s abdomen at the University of Michigan Hospital, the 54-year-old veteran Thurston football and baseball coach was in dire straits.

A genetic condition called polycystic kidney disease had reduced Snell’s kidney function to a dangerous four-percent level, making dialysis a daunting probability.

Despite the relentless fatigue and dramatic weight loss that accelerated during the past year, Snell continued to teach and coach at Thurston — with only a few people (members of his family and his closest friends) aware of the battle he was waging.

“There’s a good chance I may not have been able to coach this coming season without the transplant; or, at the very least, I probably would have missed several practices because I would have been on dialysis,” noted Snell, emphasizing the exquisite timing of the procedure.

“For Pete to step up for me like he did, I mean, I can’t come close to putting it into words as far as how grateful I am. The way I felt after the transplant compared to how I felt before it is like night and day.

“I feel great now. I lost 24 pounds in the past year or so (going from 165 to 141 pounds), so it was taking a toll on my body. But I’ve already started to gain some weight and my energy level is so much greater.”

Kotsogiannis, whose sister is married to Snell, said he didn’t hesitate to volunteer for the paired donor program once he heard about the worsening condition of Snell’s health.

“When you think about donating an organ in the abstract — when you ask yourself, ‘Would I donate a kidney to a loved one if the need arose’ — it poses kind of a dilemma in your mind, because you think about all the things that go along with it,” admitted Kotsogiannis. “But when it happened in reality, it clarified things and, for me at least, it made the decision (to donate a kidney) a no-brainer.

“I’ve been coaching with Bob for close to 20 years now. He’s not only been a mentor, but he’s been like a brother.”

According to the University of Michigan Transplant Center’s website, the paired donor program can greatly enhance the odds of matching up potential donors to people in need of a kidney.

The paired kidney program is offered to patients like Snell, who have a willing donor (Kotsogiannis) whose blood type isn’t a viable match.

With the help of an elaborate nationwide computer network, matches are found for the program’s participants and then the meticulous task of coordinating the actual transplants is coordinated between the patients’ transplant centers.

The paired program is advantageous to the benefactors because living kidneys have a higher (and significantly longer) success rate compared to kidneys that are taken from a deceased donor, the website noted.

The wait for a deceased person’s kidney can also stretch over several years.

Humans require only one healthy kidney to live a full and normal life.

“Pete and I joined the program about a year and a half ago,” Snell said. “We both had to undergo a series of tests, including blood and tissue evaluations. Once all the preliminary work is done, you wait and hope.”

“The entire process was really a miracle of God and a miracle of medicine,” Kotsogiannis added.

Snell and Kotsogiannis emphatically praised the efforts of the UM Transplant Center, particularly Chad Abbott, who played a key role in orchestrating their successful experience.

“There’s actually an entire team of people who do a lot to make this work,” Kotsogiannis said. “The fact that they’re able to find matches for people on the other side of the country like they did for us is just remarkable.”

Individuals who may wish to consider donating a kidney should call1-800-333-9013. Potential donors undergo tests for blood and tissue type before going through a pre-donation evaluation, which includes a nephrologist, a transplant surgeon and a social worker.

Living donors are free to confidentially withdraw from the program at any time during the donation evaluation process and are not obligated to donate.